King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (7 page)

It wasn’t the best of bandages, but it would do for now.

Finally feeling more like myself again, I changed into a clean set of clothes and then switched places with Dmitri while he went to take a shower of his own.

When he came out he took the empty bed while I stretched out next to Denise. Then we all tried to get some sleep.

Somewhere around three in the morning, I woke up to the sound of Denise calling my name, her voice full of fear and desperation.

“I’m here. Right here,” I said gently, reaching out with my right hand to reassure her.

To my surprise, she moved in close, putting her head on my shoulder and her arm across my chest, clinging to me tightly.

For a moment, I didn’t know what to do.

Then I let my arm slip around her shoulder and hugged her back. Her hair tickled my nostrils and the scent of jasmine and coffee, that unique scent that I associated only with her, filled my nose.

It would have been pretty damn close to perfect if she hadn’t spoken up again, her voice thick with sleep.

“He’s coming, Hunt. He’s coming for both of us.”

I had no idea who she was talking about.

“Who’s coming, Denise?” I asked her gently.

She mumbled something under her breath.

“Say that again. I didn’t hear you.”

But her breathing slowed and then deepened, and I realized that she’d fallen asleep again without hearing my question.

I spent much of the rest of the night lying there with my eyes open in the darkness, thinking about her answer. No matter how many times I heard it in my head, it always sounded the same.

“Death,” she’d said.

Death was coming for us.

8

HUNT

We rose before dawn, wanting to make an early start of it. I watched from the motel room window as Dmitri prowled through the parking lot with a pocket knife. Thankfully very few customers had gotten underway at that hour and there were still several cars in the parking lot. Choosing one of the cars at random, he used the knife to take off the license plate and put our plate back on the car in its place.

Last night’s encounter had been too close for comfort. As far as we knew, Hendricks hadn’t had time to run our plates, but that didn’t mean that every cop for miles around wasn’t going to be looking for us at this point. We didn’t need to make it any easier for them to find us by driving around in the same car with the same license plate, Dmitri explained. By switching the plates, we could at least pass a general inspection without raising too many red flags.

Human nature being what it is, I knew that if Dmitri simply took the other license plate off the car and didn’t put anything in its place, it would be noticed a lot faster than if he replaced the missing one with our own. The eye is trained to notice change; an empty spot where the plate should be was the kind of thing that caught your eye. But if the eye saw a license plate where a license plate was expected to be, then very few people would actually pay attention to what was on the plate itself.

In fact, it might take the owner of the other vehicle from several days to a week before they realized that something was different. A few days would be more than enough time for us to ditch the stolen plates and figure something else out.

Or so I hoped.

It was the work of only a few more minutes to put the stolen plate on the Charger. Back in the room I found Denise was already up and about, getting ready for the second leg of our trip, and so I asked about what she’d seen.

“What was it?” I asked.

“What was what?”

“Your vision.”

Her silence spoke volumes.

“You don’t remember?”

“No,” she said, and I could hear the confusion in her voice. “I had a vision?”

At first I couldn’t believe that she didn’t remember, but after questioning her for several minutes, it was clear that she did not. Nor did she remember her comments in the middle of the night.

While she grabbed a quick shower, Dmitri and I studied the map and tried to figure out the best route for us to take. Given the fact that we weren’t sure just how much interest local law enforcement would show in us, it seemed safer to stick to the back roads for a while longer, at least until we put another state line between us and the Tennessee state police. We were able to trace out a route that would get us across the western tip of Georgia and into Alabama without too much trouble.

By just after seven we were on the road, headed southwest once more. We had another five hundred some odd miles to go, which meant a good ten- to twelve-hour drive, depending upon what we ran into along the way, and we didn’t have any time to waste.

The morning passed without incident and we decided to risk getting back on the main thoroughfares, picking up Interstate 59 after crossing into Alabama. That continued the diagonal route we’d planned, taking us through Birmingham and the middle part of the state. We stopped for a late lunch somewhere north of the Mississippi line, then crossed the rest of the state and entered Louisiana itself.

We caught the first news report about a hundred miles outside of New Orleans. I was flipping through the stations, looking for something other than country music, when I landed on the tail end of a broadcast.

“… another strange case of that mystery illness in New Orleans, this time a young woman in her twenties. Local authorities tell us they suspect some kind of a flulike virus, maybe even a mutated strain of H1N1, but tests have so far been inconclusive. This is Tyler Jackson, reporting live from New Orleans.”

I cocked my head, wondering if I’d heard correctly. Unknown illness? New Orleans?

Denise was having the same difficulty in making sense of it that I was. “Did he say New Orleans?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

I spun the dial, looking for another newscast, but eventually gave up without finding anything. It seemed we’d have to wait a little longer to figure out what was going on.

I didn’t like it, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so why stress?

At least that’s what I told myself.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work that way. The closer we got to the city, the more anxious I became. It was like my body knew something that my head hadn’t managed to figure out yet and it was doing its best to communicate that information with the only tools it had at its disposal. The increased heart rate, the difficulty breathing, the inability to sit still for more than a few moments, all of which were evidence that my body was trying to tell my brain it was making a big mistake.

It didn’t matter what I did to try to calm myself: the anxiety wouldn’t go away.

By the time the city loomed ahead of us, I was a nervous wreck.

9

HUNT

We entered New Orleans from the east, driving south through St. Tammany Parish to the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and then into the city proper across the Causeway. In the setting sunlight I couldn’t see, so I asked Dmitri to describe the Causeway to me as we drove across. It wasn’t every day that you found yourself atop the world’s longest continuous bridge over water.

Dmitri was his usual eloquent self. “It’s a long stretch of road over a big muddy lake.”

Apparently I wasn’t the only one tired of the long drive. I settled for rolling down the window and letting the humid Louisiana air roll across my face, imagining I was poling my skiff through a cypress swamp while trees draped with Spanish moss soared high around me.

And they say I’m not a romantic.

The mental exercise had the added benefit of helping to calm the anxiety I had been feeling for the last hour. By the time we reached the other side of the lake and entered the city proper, I was back to my usual grumpy self.

Denise began to work her way through the part of New Orleans known as Metairie, not far from the infamous 17th Street Canal breach that played such a big role during the flooding after Katrina. Unlike the average individual, I hadn’t been able to watch the news reports as they’d come in during the storm and so I hadn’t seen the pictures of either the flooding or the aftermath. At the time, I hadn’t particularly cared; all of my attention had been focused on my search for my daughter, Elizabeth. But now that I was here in person, I was struck by the desire to experience it for myself. Call it academic interest, call it morbid curiosity; all I knew was that I needed to see it for myself, to get a sense of the lay of the land before we got involved in whatever it was that Denise’s patron deity had in store for us.

I tapped Dmitri on the shoulder from the backseat.

“Mind if I have a look?” I asked.

He must have been feeling apologetic for his surliness earlier, for I felt him shrug as he said, “Suit yourself.”

I’d borrowed Dmitri’s sight before and quickly made the connection. Borrowing the sight from a Mundane makes everything appeared washed out, like a colored shirt left too long in the sun, but borrowing the sight from one of the Gifted like Dmitri is the closest thing I’ve found to being able to see normally again.

It took me less than five minutes of looking around to realize something about New Orleans.

It was a city of ghosts.

And I don’t just mean the literal kind, although there were plenty of those to go around, too. No, what I mean is that New Orleans has a way of haunting itself, a way of showing its true face to those who are smart and clever enough to look for it and of hiding it away from those who are not, like a spirit that can be seen only by those who truly believe in its existence in the first place.

First there was the City-That-Was, an ephemeral sense of a time gone by that still lingered in a kind of mystic echo, one that would suddenly rear its head in the glimpse of a face in the window of a Garden District plantation house or in the swagger of a sailor fresh off one of the boats along the lakeshore. From the narrow streets and wrought iron balconies of the French Quarter to the aboveground cemeteries that dotted the city haphazardly, the past cried out for recognition.

Then there was the City-That-Has-Been, the spirit that stubbornly refused to bend in the aftermath of disaster, the remnants of what was left after the devastation wrought by the ravages of Mother Nature and the greedy nonchalance of the men who believed that nothing could ever harm their precious jewel of a city, no matter the warnings or the dire predictions that came before. Hurricane Katrina did more than just destroy a few billion dollars of property: it stole the innocence of the city’s residents and snatched away their hope of the future, one aspect of the city murdering its own descendant before it had even been born.

Five years after the disaster and still the evidence remained: Block after block of destroyed homes, some no more than moldering piles of debris, others still standing but forever branded with that discoloration at waist height that marked the high point of the water’s reach and, just as often, the markings of the searchers themselves in the aftermath, those ubiquitous National Guard unit IDs and numbers spray painted on the outside of the families’ homes, noting the presence of their dead and the number that each house contained. Neighborhoods in the midst of rebuilding. Families making do the best they could. Like a cancer that couldn’t be cut out, the ghost of that city had burrowed in deep and haunted the souls of those who remained, just as it would for a long time to come.

Finally, there was the ghost of the City-That-Might-Yet-Be. You couldn’t see it all that well just yet, for it remained cloaked in darkness, hiding from the light. But if you turned a corner in that precious moment when the sun was setting and night was only just beginning to fall, you could see it there, struggling to get out, to show us that the old girl had some life in her yet.

The ghosts of the past, present, and future, all vying for dominance.

Denise began scouting around for a hotel that wouldn’t ask too many questions, where we could come and go at will without being noticed. After driving around for a half hour, we finally found a place that looked like it would suit our needs.

It was called the Majestic, which was the height of irony, for there was nothing at all majestic about it. I didn’t even need my vision to tell me so. The crack of the decades-old linoleum underfoot in the central lobby, the stink of mold and body odor that wafted off the walls, the tepid air that barely stirred as we passed through it, all those things told me the dilapidated old place had probably never heard of better days, never mind seen them. Calling it a roach-infested dump was giving it way too much credit.

The lights in the lobby, though dim, were still bright enough to keep me from seeing much even with my sunglasses on, so I kept myself to the left of Denise and let her motion subtly guide me along. I could have used my cane, but I didn’t want to make it obvious that I was blind. We were a long way from Boston, but the proliferation of shows like
America’s Most Wanted
meant it was best if we kept as low a profile as possible. Besides, the FBI had placed a fifty-thousand-dollar reward on my head, and in this economy there were too many people who would consider that easy money.

Dmitri went over to the registration desk while Denise and I waited, our backs turned slightly so that the clerk couldn’t get a good look at either of us. Dmitri came back with the keys to two rooms on the third floor and the news that the elevator was “out of service.” Given the state of the place, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been that way for the last few decades.

Our rooms were at the end of the hall, though not adjacent to each other. It didn’t matter; we had no intention of using that first room anyway. We’d rented it simply to keep the desk clerk from asking too many questions or remembering us for all the wrong reasons. Dmitri let us into that second room, the one farther down the hall from the stairwell. There were only two beds, but that wasn’t a problem for us; in a place like this, one of us was always going to be on watch while the others slept. The rougher parts of New Orleans had always been, well, rough, and in the aftermath of Katrina they’d gotten considerably worse. I wouldn’t have put it past the clerk in the lobby to sell us out to some of the local riffraff as an easy way to make a few bucks. If they looked for us in the other room first, we’d hear them. If they tried this one …